Republicans Get Poverty All Wrong. Trust Me, I’ve Lived It.

This Saturday, six Republican presidential candidates will gather alongside House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. Tim Scott at a conference on poverty. Organized by three domestic policy think tanks, the Kemp Forum on Expanding Opportunity bills itself as a platform for them to “discuss their ideas for fighting poverty and expanding opportunity in America.”

For a party not exactly known for its sympathy toward the less fortunate, that the GOP is talking about them in the first place seems like a sign of progress. With 46 million Americans living in poverty today, both parties—not just liberal Democrats—ought to be taking this issue seriously. And yet, as someone who grew up among the American poor and has listened to politicians talk about how to solve the problem of people like me for decades, I fear we won’t hear much of anything new. In my experience, most of those who claim to know the solution to American poverty have no idea what povertyreally means to those who have lived in it.

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If you met me, you wouldn’t think I grew up in a desperately poor home.As a white, Jewish native of Manhattan with a degree from an elite college and a white-collar career, I often surprise people when I tell them that I remember what food stamps looked like when they were actual paper coupons. People from my class background don’t usually make it into the ranks of educated professionals, and I don’t fit the stereotype of what a poor person looks or sounds like. Today, I am no longer poor—or at least, not nearly as poor as I used to be—and I count myself fortunate to have escaped the trap of intergenerational poverty with the ability and opportunity to tell my tale.

I grew up in Manhattan’s East Village during the late 1980s and the 1990s with a single mother who struggled her entire life with depression, addiction and the unresolved consequences of growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional household. My mother had always expected to get married and have a husband to provide for her, but that didn’t work out as planned, while she herself had a hard time holding down a job and was hopeless with money. Throughout my childhood, our income consisted of the public assistance she received on my behalf—my father was not forthcoming with child support—and what little she made on the side working off the books as a massage therapist. The gaps that remained she filled by “borrowing” from her sister and an ever-dwindling selection of friends. I never went hungry or lost my home, but our living situation was always fairly precarious. I was more familiar with New York’s social service system and housing court by the age of 10 than most adults who live in the city.

Yes, in the end, I managed to claw my way out of poverty and into some semblance of stability. That took a lot of work on my part, but it also depended greatly on the kindness of others, and something politicians don’t like to talk about: pure dumb luck.

That’s why, when people praise me for getting out of poverty, I don’t really accept the compliment. Implicit in that praise is the notion that it was all up to me—that I “pulled myself up,” and that if I had failed to improve my lot, I would somehow be at fault—that it would be a consequence of my life choices. That’s precisely the sort of high-minded scolding we can expect to hear from the food-stamp-cutting millionaires at the Kemp Forum.

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This misapprehension of poverty is made all the more insidious by our political class’ infatuation with it. Donald Trump, currently leading the Republican presidential field, thinks that the way to get 50 million Americans “off” poverty (that’s how Sean Hannity put it, as though poverty were some kind of drug) is to create vaguely stated incentives to work—and take away the “disincentives” of public assistance. Democrats, meanwhile, are terrified of being portrayed as defenders of the moocher class. Their leading candidate, Hillary Clinton, has a view of poor people virtually identical to those of her GOP opponents. She supported her husband’s disastrous gutting of welfare in the ‘90s and consistently defended it by insulting poor people as deadbeats and dependents. When Bernie Sanders—the only candidate who seems to grasp that poor people can still have dignity—tries to talk about poverty, the media quibble with his citations and call him a liar. No wonder most Democrats prefer to talk about the middle class.

There’s no denying that poor people make bad choices all the time. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter much because we don’t actually have that many choices to make, economic or otherwise. This, more than anything else, is what our moralizing politicos fail to understand about American poverty: how often we get stuck in situations where we have no options.

One time in college, I was home for the holidays when I got sick enough that I had to go to the doctor (when you’re poor and uninsured, of course, that threshold is pretty high). Because I was going to school in Massachusetts, I was required to have health insurance there, but the bare-bones insurance the college provided for me as part of my scholarship was useless out of state, and paying for a medical visit wasn’t in my budget.

My family doctor’s office doesn’t turn patients away, so I was able to get help for free, but I had to sit with a social worker, explain why I couldn’t pay and answer a number of completely irrelevant and very personal questions about my mental health, sexual history and drug use. It’s condescending and intrusive, and if you’re not poor, this kind of thing doesn’t happen to you. Having grown up in the welfare system, I was familiar with such petty indignities. It might sound like no big deal in isolation—who wouldn’t answer a few questions in exchange for a doctor’s visit?—but the accumulation of them sends a constant message that as a poor person, your time, your privacy and your feelings are less valuable than those of other people. If I’d had the money, I would have paid it simply to be treated as respectfully as everyone else in that office.

One corollary to poor people having few if any good choices is our expectation that whatever we do, we will be criticized for it. When poverty itself is viewed as a moral failing, it doesn’t make any difference how you handle it. If a single mom chooses to work only part-time and accept state benefits so she can spend more time at home with her child (as my mother did), she’s a lazy welfare cheat; if she leaves the kid home alone in the evening to work that extra shift, she’s a negligent parent.